Cars Get a Low Priority in the Rebuilding of Our Cities

For many years after World War II, you were as likely to get a grocery store built within walking distance as a smelter.

January 2011
By
AARON ROBINSON
Photos By
BART EVERETT

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Coincidentally, my oldest friend is also named Aaron. As fourth-graders on the playground, we called ourselves “Aaron 1” and “Aaron 2,” but I don’t remember with certainty who was which.

The other Aaron is off to Africa for a couple of years on a State Department posting. So a few Saturdays ago, I rode up the California coast on a motorcycle to see him off. On a bike, you can smoke right through a column of weekend congestion thanks to the state’s unique lane-splitting law, which permits motorcycles to share lanes with, and thus go between, other vehicles. Drivers call it suicidal. Riders call it sanity preserving.

California has nearly doubled its head count since 1970 and laid concrete and home tracts to the horizons. The resulting traffic is so bad that we scoot jockeys consider it worth the bodily risks to be immune from it. Even as more people move in, the state lacks both the money and the political will to add more roads. Where’s it all headed?

Well, Los Angeles city planners are headed to the beach. The new Purple Line, a planned extension of the city’s embryonic subway, will finally bore into the hideously expensive dirt underneath L.A.’s traffic-constipated west side. Projected cost: somewhere between $4.2 billion and $9 billion depending on whether the tube goes just nine miles from downtown or the full 17.5 to the ocean. While the relatively few affected residents dicker over details, most of L.A. County’s 10 million inhabitants are giving it a collective shrug. The subway won’t do much for their commute.

Well, maybe not in the next decade or three. But perhaps we should expand our time frame. After all, nobody who helped dig the first shaft for the New York City subway in 1904 could have imagined the metropolis it serves today. Cities tend to rebuild themselves around their transportation options.

Take Alexandria, Virginia, where the other Aaron and his wife still own a condo with a view of the Washington Monument. There, developers are trying to purchase and raze his 10-building cluster of late-1960s cement blocks. Their plan, endorsed by local government, is to erect a brand-new mini-town of commercial and high-density residential structures. The location is hot largely because of the adjacent light-rail station, which plugs residents into the 106-mile, 86-station Metrorail system linking Virginia and Maryland with the District.

Compared with New York, the District is a relative newcomer to mass transit. Construction of the Metrorail began in December 1969, and the initial 103-mile plan wasn’t completed until January 2001. Meanwhile, the region developed along a familiar pattern: Folks got into their cars and drove farther and farther out in search of an affordable white picket fence.

Another old friend, Jeff Kaufman, who is a transportation planner for the intergovernmental Houston-Galveston Area Council, says land planning since the 1920s has been a reaction to the public-health effects of the industrial age. To separate residential and commercial development, factories and warehouses were confined to industrial ghettos and shops to narrow corridors along a city’s major grid arteries, with houses planted like corn rows in the serene middle.

Thus, for many years after World War II, you were as likely to get a grocery store built within walking distance of your front door as an aluminum smelter. And nobody cared since almost everybody had cars.

Populations boomed. Traffic worsened. Generations faded away and were replaced. And now, change is afoot. The Metrorail system has given the D.C. area a skeleton upon which to hang the meat of a new urban landscape. Slowly—indeed, glacially, especially during a recession because we’re talking mainly about private capital rather than government handouts—the region is reconstructing itself with housing situated right next to or, indeed, right on top of commerce.

As in other cities, such as Portland, Austin, and Seattle, D.C.-area master plans have been altered to favor higher-density mixed-use development, with mass transit displacing the car as the enabler. Aaron’s condo is at the coal face of this transformation.

What does it mean for drivers? Less larder from the public trough, most likely. Mass transit can’t pay its own bills. Metrorail acknowledges in its 2009 financial report that passenger fares cover only one-third of its costs. Another third is government subsidies, tax dollars that are also desperately needed for road projects.

Drivers should be raising hell—except they aren’t. In 2008, for example, Los Angeles voters, the vast majority of whom drive to work, hiked their own sales tax to pay for a transportation package that included both road improvements and extending the city’s mass-transit system. And like ants awaiting the command to start moving sand grains, L.A.-area developers have drawn up the first redevelopment plans that will leverage the proximity of the Purple Line’s new stations.

As with other cities, Los Angeles spent most of the last century evolving to suit the automobile. Undoing the car’s influence on the cityscape may take another century, but like it or not, the work has already begun.

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